One of the possible changes under incoming LAPD chief Michel Moore, should his appointment be approved by the City Council, could be the department dialing back its aggressive response to citing homeless people for quality-of-life infractions like sleeping on the sidewalk or storing property on the street. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

For much of the time the Rev. Andy Bales has worked on Skid Row as the head of the Union Rescue Mission, he’s been one of the few with a street-level view of the community and how the LAPD has policed it.

In his 13 years serving Skid Row’s homeless, he’s seen different responses to tackling the community’s issues from the city and its law enforcement officers. Under former LAPD Chief Bill Bratton, that meant aggressive cleanups of encampments and ticketing of homeless people for drugs and other minor offenses.

“We would tell people, ‘We’re coming, you gotta break down your tent at 6 p.m. and come back at 9 p.m.,” Bales said. “And then the police would come behind us.”

Court orders banning police from confiscating homeless people’s property created a new dynamic. Before the rulings, Bales said the clean-ups prompted many to enter a shelter for the night and encouraged access to drug treatment and other resources.

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But the hands-off approach LAPD took in response to the court orders meant even more chaos.

“That’s when Skid Row was declared a public health crisis. Police wouldn’t even get out of their cars. It became more violent than ever,” Bales said. “For a few years, I would reach out to the (Central Division) commander and say policing by loudspeaker from the car was not going to work.”

Things are still difficult. As the numbers of the city’s homeless have swelled, Chief Charlie Beck’s approach has prompted some improvement, Bales said.

“Every night, police at Central Division call me to see how many cots are open,” he said. “In the last few years, they began to get out of the cars and walk the beat.”

LAPD Officer Deon Joseph walks through the Skid Row area of Los Angeles on April 12, 2017. He has worked in Skid Row for almost two decades. (Photo by Hans Gutknecht, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)

But as Beck’s retirement looms on June 27, the question now for many homeless advocates is how those policies could change again under Beck’s successor — First Assistant Chief of Operations Michel Moore, Beck’s second-in-command. On June 4, Mayor Eric Garcetti chose Moore to be LAPD’s next chief.

Getting creative on a ‘crisis’

At the event at City Hall announcing Moore as his choice, Garcetti praised the nearly four-decade LAPD veteran as a deeply knowledgeable leader who also embraced reform.

Moore was the first commander to take over the LAPD’s Rampart area after a police brutality scandal that emerged in the 1990s led the department to clean house at the station.

According to Garcetti and other city leaders, as the top commander of the department’s thousands of patrol officers since 2010, Moore has also been instrumental in putting the policing reforms they mandated into action.

And in interviews with Los Angeles Police Commission members and the City Council, the likely next LAPD chief — his appointment still needs to be approved by the council — has also already proposed a few bold ideas for ramping up the pace of change inside the department.

One of those changes could involve dialing back LAPD’s aggressive response to citing homeless people for quality-of-life infractions, like sleeping on the sidewalk or storing property on the street.

From 2016 to 2017, the number of citations rose 8.5 percent alongside even greater increases in arrests of homeless people. Critics of the response have described it as criminalizing homelessness.

What that policy and others could end up looking like won’t be clear for some time. Police Commissioner Steve Soboroff said any new policy Moore proposes would first need to be subject to community input, including that of residents and business owners.

As chief, that’s also the needle he’ll have to thread when dealing with homelessness — ensuring his officers aren’t violating the civil rights of homeless people while also trying to respond to neighborhood complaints.

“It’s not an all-or-nothing proposal,” Soboroff said. “It wouldn’t be ‘expunge everyone’s record, or don’t expunge anybody’s.’ There would be levels, and I believe that there are levels where it makes good sense, and where it doesn’t make as much sense (to expunge someone’s low-level citation).”

But Soboroff also said Moore’s expansive understanding of the department and its patrol operations could end up being key in allowing the next chief to tackle homelessness in more creative ways.

“This is a full-blown crisis. This is an earthquake,” Soboroff said. “He really excels at pulling people together to make the kind of changes necessary.

“If you’re going to pick somebody to deal with a crisis the day after they’re sworn in, of all the law enforcement officers in America you could choose, not just the three candidates we talked to, Michel Moore would be one of the top picks, or the absolute top pick.”

Councilman Mitch Englander, a reserve LAPD officer, is among those who interviewed Moore. He found that the potential chief supported “multi-disciplinary operations,” like the department’s HOPE teams and responses to cleaning up encampments.

He’s also seen that preference for bringing in outside voices to come up with plans that involve solutions other than more policing in person.

Since last September, Englander has been pushing a pilot program of increased homelessness response from a working task force in his west San Fernando Valley district. The task force is made up of local police, service providers and faith-based volunteers. He said Moore was deeply involved in the effort.

“When we got it off the ground, we started with seven months of funding. We met regularly with Chief Moore and (LAPD Valley Division Capt.) John Sherman,” and other San Fernando Valley commanders, Englander said.

“We had a regularly scheduled weekly meeting where we brought in everybody, where we would bring in all the service providers — brought in the faith-based providers to work together.”

Englander said he’s seen success so far from the response, and he expects Moore as chief to work to expand similar teams to LAPD’s other divisions. He said the importance of the working groups was to find ways other than policing to help solve the city’s homelessness crisis.

“We know we just can’t solve this with a stick, and we just can’t solve it with a carrot,” Englander said. “We know it has to be both.”

Joshua Cain is a crime and public safety reporter for the Southern California News Group, based at the L.A. Daily News in Woodland Hills. He has worked for SCNG since 2016, previously as a digital news editor in the San Gabriel Valley, helping cover breaking news, crime and local politics.